Native Artifacts Research Articles

Digital Twins and Enabling Technologies in Museums and Cultural Heritage: An Overview.

This paper presents an overview of various types of virtual museums (ViM) as native artifacts or as digital twins (DT) of physical museums (PM). Depending on their mission and features, we discuss various enabling technologies and sensor equipment with their specific requirements and complexities, advantages and drawbacks in relation to each other at all stages of a DT's life cycle. A DT is a virtual construct and embodies innovative concepts based on emerging technologies (ET) using adequate sensor configurations for (meta-)data import and exchange. Our keyword-based search for articles, conference papers, (chapters from) books and reviews yielded 43 contributions and 43 further important references from Industry 4.0, Tourism and Heritage 4.0. After closer examination, a reference corpus of 40 contributions was evaluated in detail and classified along with their variants of DT-content-, communication-, and collaboration-centric and risk-informed ViMs. Their system features correlate with different application areas (AA), new or improved technologies-mostly still under development-and sensors used. Our proposal suggests a template-based, generative approach to DTs using standardized metadata formats, expert/curator software and customers'/visitors' engagement. It advocates for stakeholders' collaboration as part of a comprehensive validation and verification assessment (V&VA) throughout the DT's entire life cycle.

WINIKO: Life of an Object, First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

<i>WINIKO: Life of an Object</i>, First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Native Voices Exhibition: Stories of health, wellness, and illness from American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) exhibition known as Native Voices reflected Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D.’s keen and long-held desire to help improve public understanding of Native American health challenges and honor the culture, tradition, and healing ways of Native Peoples. A centerpiece of the exhibition was a large set of video interviews that Dr. Lindberg conducted with Native health and community leaders. Dr. Lindberg and his team engaged Native advisors in the exhibition development; sought Native input through Listening Circles, Tribal Consultations; and site visits, and made the video interviews accessible via interactive kiosks and iPads. For its time, this was state-of-the-art exhibition technology. The exhibition also included Native artifacts and art works to complement the videos, including a scale model of the iconic Hokule’a Native Hawaiian voyaging canoe, and a full-size Lummi Indian healing totem pole. The totem journeyed across the U.S. prior to its installation next to the NLM herbal garden in Bethesda, MD. A traveling version of the exhibition visited more than 130 venues in 40 States across the U.S. The interview clips and other content are accessible on the exhibition website, and the full-length interviews are retained in the NLM permanent video collection.

Native Voices Exhibition: Stories of Health, Wellness, and Illness from American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) exhibition known as Native Voices reflected Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D.'s keen and long-held desire to help improve public understanding of Native American health challenges and honor the culture, tradition, and healing ways of Native Peoples. A centerpiece of the exhibition was a large set of video interviews that Dr. Lindberg conducted with Native health and community leaders. Dr. Lindberg and his team engaged Native advisors in the exhibition development; sought Native input through Listening Circles, Tribal Consultations; and site visits, and made the video interviews accessible via interactive kiosks and iPads. For its time, this was state-of-the-art exhibition technology. The exhibition also included Native artifacts and art works to complement the videos, including a scale model of the iconic Hokule'a Native Hawaiian voyaging canoe, and a full-size Lummi Indian Healing Totem Pole. The totem journeyed across the U.S. prior to its installation next to the NLM herbal garden in Bethesda, MD. A traveling version of the exhibition visited more than 130 venues in 40 States across the U.S. The interview clips and other content are accessible on the exhibition website, and the full-length interviews are retained in the NLM permanent video collection.

Promoting the Nigerian Museums: a case for Ijebu "National" Museum and others

This paper raises other issues amidst the concerns of scholars concerning the repatriation of native artifacts. In what I term “Nigerian Chaos,” this paper informs scholars on the dysfunctional state of public institutions in Nigeria and it’s effects

Past Americana

Past Americana Kirsten Silva Gruesz The course of empire shadows the pun behind this meditation on the scales of literary history. My title echoes Pax Americana, the period of global peace initiated by the cementing of U.S. military and economic hegemony at the end of the Second World War. That pax, however, only counts as such by limited measures. The fact that there have been no declared hostilities between the world's most powerful nation-states since Bretton Woods has the effect of minimizing their many proxy wars—and of casting popular uprisings in the Global South as violations of a postwar order that has meant peace only for some. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the modifier Americana likewise falls short. For to the extent that the United States served as the world's guarantor against international conflict for the remainder of the twentieth century, it is clear now that it did so within a tangle of economic and military self-interest, in precisely the mode of the Roman pax imperia. But this is not to take us into tired condemnations of American empire. If, in the new isolationism of the Trump era, the Pax Americana sounds like a quaint reminder of bygone times, this neatly brings the Latin term into alignment with the colloquial meaning of the English borrowing, Americana. A neologism from the later nineteenth century, Americana describes the paper relics that symbolize a shared national past: originally signifying older books and maps, its meaning later extended to include ephemera like the signatures of famous dead statesmen or sportsmen. The gendered nouns are accurate, for the collecting of such artifacts was, during the first Gilded Age, a dominantly male pursuit not unlike a sporting competition. In the second chapter of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the rich and indolent Percy Gryce natters on to Lily Bart (at her calculated urging, as they share a seat on the train) about his conquest of other contenders in pursuit of some choice bits of Americana: "'I've got a few new things,' he said, suffused with pleasure, but lowering his voice as if he feared his fellow-passengers might be in league to despoil him."1 He has inherited the Gryce Americana, a precious collection well known to bibliophiles whose precise contents remain meaningfully unspecified. [End Page 387] In this usage, the objects known as Americana acquire monetary value on the basis of both their rarity and their desirability as fetish; collectors prize unique copies and first editions, referred to competitively (in Wharton's time and today) as firsts. Lily's rejection of this queerly young antiquarian—"initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation"—as a potential husband marks one of her first rebellions against the commodity culture to which she has been raised.2 It is no accident that Gryce is the possessor of American paper relics in particular. His grasping reduction of books from living receptacles of meaning to prizes in a contest seems to represent a fall from the patriotic motivations of, say, Isaiah Thomas, whose collecting impulse led him to found the American Antiquarian Society in 1812. Thomas's interest in American antiquities, from imprints to Native artifacts, helped create the material conditions for the nationalist mythmaking of the mid-nineteenth century. And while the New England filiopietism that such repositories fostered is riddled with erasures and ideological fissures—as Wharton was well aware—at least Thomas aimed to share, not to hoard, the things he identified as having a special power to enclose and transfer such collective memory. The novel implicitly mocks the dynastically named "Gryce Americana" as a form of conspicuous wealth-display stripped of communal social values. Gryce tends it in the service of a bare commodity fetishism that is morally lower, in Wharton's universe, than the naive or provincial interest in one's own country that she mocks more gently elsewhere: the kind of interest that motivated the formation of countless local, regional, and national historical societies during the nineteenth century. If Pax Americana carries with it a sense of obliviousness to its own self-interest, so too does Americana...

Digital forensic approaches for Amazon Alexa ecosystem

Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as the Amazon Echo – a smart speaker developed by Amazon – are undoubtedly great sources of potential digital evidence due to their ubiquitous use and their always-on mode of operation, constituting a human-life's black box. The Amazon Echo in particular plays a centric role for the cloud-based intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) Alexa developed by Amazon Lab126. The Alexa-enabled wireless smart speaker is the gateway for all voice commands submitted to Alexa. Moreover, the IVA interacts with a plethora of compatible IoT devices and third-party applications that leverage cloud resources. Understanding the complex cloud ecosystem that allows ubiquitous use of Alexa is paramount on supporting digital investigations when need raises. This paper discusses methods for digital forensics pertaining to the IVA Alexa's ecosystem. The primary contribution of this paper consists of a new efficient approach of combining cloud-native forensics with client-side forensics (forensics for companion devices), to support practical digital investigations. Based on a deep understanding of the targeted ecosystem, we propose a proof-of-concept tool, CIFT, that supports identification, acquisition and analysis of both native artifacts from the cloud and client-centric artifacts from local devices (mobile applications and web browsers).

The lives of things: Native objects, human rights and ndn-indian relationality

Vital non-human things are too easily severed from their human “owners” due, in part, to particular human rights logics that enact market logics of equivalence, multicultural investments in recognition, settler-colonial categories of life and death, and Westphalian notions of racial identity. Using the controversial sale of Native artifacts as our primary example, and borrowing from recent thought on temporality and liveliness in feminist physics, we consider how a rethinking (not just expansion) of the subject of human rights opens up possibilities beyond the rights to development, enshrined in the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and towards something like rights of relationality. We turn to the contemporary photoart of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew to explore sovereignty and solidarity across NDN/Indian divides.

Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest by Jack Nisbet

 OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 treaty proved tortuous and a feeling of “It’s a lie. He’s lying” spread among the conferees (p. 20). In the end, the document was signed and ratified, but the repercussions that unfolded from that fateful moment have remained with the signatory parties to the present day. On the Tulalip reservation that was created by the authority vested in the Point Elliott Treaty, Dover describes deplorable social and economic conditions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Unemployment was rampant, hunger was a daily reality, medical care was virtually non-existent, neither the tribe nor its members had any money, and racist attitudes exhibited by neighboring non-Natives were pervasive.Death hovered all around, with Dover’s older sister numbering among the casualties. The survivors were left suspended in a state of demoralization and alcoholism. Boarding school education, treaties, and reservation life are three topics of many that Dover raises from the welcome perspective of a Native American woman who struggled to survive through those trying and troubling times. Anyone seeking a deeper and richer understanding of Native American history, as well as the growth and development of the reservation community at Tulalip,and Dover’s long-standing efforts in adulthood to revive the cultural practices and traditions that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been so obsessed with stamping out, will find Tulalip, From My Heart an indispensable resource. Readers interested in this area of American history may want to consult what is a growing literature on Native American leaders in the Pacific Northwest. Recommended as a starting place is this reviewer’s own article on the late Chehalis basket weaver Hazel Pete: “A Future with a Past”(Pacific Northwest Quarterly,2000). OtherworksincludeTwoPaths:EmmettOliver’s Revolution in Indian Education (1995) by Ben Smith; Esther Ross: Stillaguamish Champion by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown (2001); White Grizzly Bear’s Legacy: Learning to be Indian (2002) by Lawney Reyes; Standing Tall: TheLifewayof KathrynJonesHarrison(2005)by Kristine Olson;Where the Salmon Run: The Life andLegacyofBillyFrank,Jr.(2012)byTrovaHeffernan ; and, Katie Gale: A Coast Salish Woman’s Life on Oyster Bay (2013) by LLyn De Danaan. Cary C. Collins Maple Valley, Washington ANCIENT PLACES: PEOPLE AND LANDSCAPE IN THE EMERGING NORTHWEST by Jack Nisbet Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2015. Notes, bibliography. 256 pages. $21.95 cloth. Ancient Places is a guided tour through the natural and cultural history of the inland Northwest with a few jaunts farther afield. Its ten essay-chapters are linked by their rootedness in a rugged landscape and by the genial erudition of their narrator. Jack Nisbet brings deep research and a keen naturalist’s eye to his main story, which is the emergence of the modern Northwest out of a crucible of upheaval that goes all the way back to the Bretz floods — cataclysms that carved the Columbia Gorge and scraped out eastern Washington’s coulee country — and continues through Euro-American settlement, Native dispossession,and the birth pangs of an extractive economy. Nisbet resists sweeping narratives, instead letting the big picture emerge from ordinary lives,little-known events,and odd twists of fate. He tells of Leno Prestini, the Italian terracotta artist who ended up in Clayton, Washington, making decorative facades for big-city banks, and William Manning, the up-and-coming mining engineer who collected Native artifacts from what he assumed was a dying race,  OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 and who is himself forgotten but for Nisbet’s thoughtful portrait, while the Tribes are still here. He tells of the Kalispel elder Victor and his son Masselow, who argued forcefully, in vain, for a reservation in their Pend Oreille Valley homeland. As in his 1994 book, Sources of the River, Nisbet interweaves historical accounts with his own closely observed experiences, moving back and forth through time on the same piece of ground. Sources of the River tethers its digressions to a strong narrative thread: the life of the explorer and fur trader David Thompson. The essays in Ancient Places, by contrast, are multi-threaded, and the tethers are sometimes a little loose. I found the first chapter a tough introduction — readers start with David Thompson’s hunting...

The Invention of Viking America

The Invention of Viking AmericaThis essay is an extended review of Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). The 448-page paperback includes ten illustrations and is priced at $27.95.IN SEARCH OF FIRST CONTACT: THE VIKINGS OF VINLAND, THE PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ANXIETY OF DISCOVERY. By Annette Kolodny. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xiv + 448 pp. $27.95, paperback.Since the publication of her seminal books and articles in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Annette Kolodny has been a true pioneer in literary historiography. Indeed, if the field of Literature as understood today has come to include multiple approaches and perspectives- including multicultural, multilingual, trans- and circum-Atlantic, as well as hemispheric perspectives-thereby utterly transforming what we mean by both American and Literature, it is in great part owing to Kolodny's tireless efforts in opening up new archives beyond the New Critical canons to include texts written in English as well as other languages by white men as well as nonwhite men and women, many of whom originated from outside the traditional Anglo-American elites. Her most recent book, In Search of First Contact, continues her quest to transform literary and to open up new archives by considering the literary record of the contact between the Americas and Europe in the eleventh century resulting from the voyages of Leif Eiriksson and other Norsemen, in particular the so-called Vinland Sagas first preserved among the Norse as oral traditions and then written down in the fourteenth century, as well as various Native artifacts and oral traditions possibly bearing testimony to this first contact. In addition, the book considers the cultural of the idea of a contact resulting from the Norse in Anglo-American letters from colonial times to the twentieth century. On the one hand, then, Kolodny writes, [T]his book is overwhelmingly about stories: about who told them, when, and where (10). On the other hand, however, it also means to take full advantage of much recent scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and history (10) in order to raise new historical questions about the nature and location of the Vinland colony, as well as about the Native Vinlanders (called Skraelings in the Sagas). The result is a book that impresses in the innovativeness of its thoroughly inter- or multi-disciplinary methodology, drawing as it does on a number of literary and nonliterary archives.As the author is doubtlessly aware, the of the notion of a contact or discovery predating Christopher Columbus's voyages reaches back in Europe to Columbus's own time, when such Spanish imperial historians as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, writing on behalf of the Spanish crown in the context of its legal fight against the Columbus family, spread tales about some anonymous pilot who had supposedly imparted the secret knowledge of the existence of a fourth to Columbus before the latter embarked on his first transatlantic voyage. The implications of this tale, if true, were clear: the rights and privileges that the crown had previously bestowed on Columbus and his descendants in the Capitulations of Santa Fe in April of 1492 regarding any lands and islands he might on his Westerly way to Asia were null and void, since he would not have been the first to discover those lands. During the seventeenth century, English imperialists such as Samuel Purchas added their own versions to the old story of a prediscovery by arguing that the so-called Rights of Discovery of the North continent belonged to England because of John Cabot's voyages on behalf of the English crown, rather than to Spain or Portugal (given that Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci had only touched the Caribbean islands and South America), and that, in any case, America had already been discovered by some medieval Welsh prince named Madoc in 1170. …

“What Marco Polo Forgot”

In 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on the Grand Canal in Venice, marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Marco Polo’s return to Europe. In 2008, as the world spiraled into a far-reaching financial collapse, a historian warned that in the long haul, “New York could turn into Venice.” These two historical moments set the stage for a discussion of how contemporary Asian art navigates the world of conceptual geography. An anthropology of art expands beyond expertise on “native artifacts” corralled in Western collections to the active interpretation of contemporary art alongside artists, curators, and critics in cosmopolitan spaces of encounter. Drawing on Cai’s exhibition I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2008, I focus on the contrasting interpretations of Cai’s key installations, that is, the perspectives that dramatize different notions of the global. Is contemporary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or an expression of an emerging global civil ...

The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915. By Elizabeth Hutchinson

Anyone who has read Museum Anthropology knows a good deal about the topic of Elizabeth Hutchinson’s book, The Indian CrazeFEuro-American passion for collecting native art. Through the years the journal has published articles on the collecting and display of Native American and First Nation peoples’ art, studies of international expositions and museums as sites of public display, and how these venues have affected the way the public sees and understands Native Americans. These studies, as well as a wealth of other articles and books, have provided a richly nuanced picture of the topics discussed in this book. Hutchinson, an art historian, uses a literary and cultural studies approach to attempt to demonstrate that the development of modernism and its aestheticism must be attributed to the Indian craze. Through the commercialization and objectification of native artifacts, the craze proposed handmade primitive objects as models for artists’ exploration of new aesthetic ideas and practices. She does this by discussing a suite of case studies in which intercultural exchange and appropriation of native art and aesthetic were evident: U.S. government schools, mainstream art institutions, and the work of transitional artists Winnebago Angel DeCora and Euro-American Gertrude Kasebier. It is in these areas that Hutchinson provides us with an insightful comparison. The book opens with the chapter ‘‘Unpacking the Indian Corner,’’ which examines the commercialization of native art through the modern aesthetic of Indian corners in eastern urban centers such as New York. The author considers the origin of Indian corners, the politics and techniques of display, and the promotion of native art as a commodity. ‘‘The White Man’s Indian Art’’ follows with a discussion of native art programs in government schools and their pervasive appropriation of the Indian craze for educational purposes. ‘‘Playing Indian’’ discusses how interest in the aesthetic value of Native American art emerged not only within the arts and crafts movement but also in mainstream art institutions. An analysis of selected art journals, schools, and exhibitions shows that the appropriation of the formal and aesthetic qualities of native art, particularly basketry and pottery, was a stepping stone for modernist artists in search of a new American character for their works. Hutchinson then presents two case studies of women artists whose works reflected this trend. In ‘‘The Indian in Kasebier’s Studio’’ Hutchinson focuses on Gertrude Kasebier, a student of Arthur Wesley Dow, and the incorporation of native aestheticism into her works as a stratagem to solve the tensions arising from being a modernist artist and a woman. ‘‘Angel DeCora’s Cultural Politics’’ examines the life and career of Winnebago artist and educator Angel DeCora and considers how DeCora appropriated the Indian craze to argue for ‘‘the economic and cultural survival of Native Americans’’ through their artistic productions (p. 171). Particular attention is paid to DeCora’s ‘‘cultural politics’’ of promoting a pan-Indian aesthetic that was deemed able to contribute to American culture and art. An epilogue focuses on ‘‘the legacy of the Indian craze’’ and its ‘‘influence on Native art’’ in the 1930s and 1970s (p. 222). This book is a good introduction for those unfamiliar with the late–19th and early–20th century American collecting practices of native art. Hutchinson forcefully argues that Americans have seen an essentialized Native American culture as distinct from mainstream culture. Although other scholars have repeatedly made this point, Hutchinson provides information about understudied collecting and display activities from the turn of the 20th century. She explicates the commodification of native objects for the beautification of the home and the appropriation of native aesthetic by Euro-American artists. In addition, she clearly draws the connection between the Indian craze and government education of Native American children, which aimed at transforming them to be producers of goods rather than equal citizens, and adds important contributions to our book reviews

A survey on the light-fastness properties of organic-based Alaska Native artifacts

Abstract A series of light-fastness tests were conducted on a group of ethnographic objects that will be on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution Arctic Studies Center, a recent addition to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center in Alaska. The objects surveyed belong to the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. This work was designed as a feasibility study on the use of a micro-fading tester as a non-contact and non-destructive technique to evaluate the light-stability of materials present in ethnographic collections. A broad range of objects containing a wide variety of materials were selected for the study. The materials investigated included a variety of dyes applied on silk, cotton, and wool substrates along with some unusual materials such as tanned skin and seal gut skin. The results from this investigation have allowed establishing exhibition recommendations taking into consideration the sensitivity of each object, light levels in the museum building, and estimated light exposures based on the duration of the exhibit. The micro-fading tester has proven to be a very useful tool for determining the light-stability of ethnographic materials without causing any harm to the objects. Objects containing equivalent materials are usually classified under a general category based on their probable sensitivity to light. However, micro-fading test results have permitted the detection of dissimilarities among some of these objects, which could be associated to variations in prior fading histories, the quality of raw materials, and different preparation methods.

Indigenous tourism stages and their implications for sustainability

This paper assesses the evolution of the relationship between tourism and indigenous peoples. Based on published work on indigenous tourism in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, a six-stage model of evolution has been proposed. The model begins with (1) pre-European in situ control, characterised by high local control and indigenous theme; (2) in situ exposure occurs in the early stages of colonialism and is followed by (3) ex situ exhibitionism and exploitation as native artefacts are displayed in museums and exhibitions. The opening of remnant indigenous space to tourist visits marks (4) in situ exhibitionism and exploitation, which represents the nadir of indigenous control but fosters strategies of resistance. Reassertions of indigenous control give rise to (5) in situ quasi-empowerment, while the extension of this control to previously occupied territory characterises (6) ex situ quasi-empowerment and the presence of “shadow indigenous tourism”. The empowerment and sustainability implications of the model have also been discussed.

Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson (review)

Reviewed by: Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson Suzanne Zeller (bio) Phil Jenkins. Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson. McClelland and Stewart. xii, 356. $34.99 What constitutes a person’s memoirs? According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the plural form denotes ‘an autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people.’ In this interesting volume on the life of the pioneering Canadian geologist and ethnologist George Mercer Dawson (1849–1901), the award-winning popular writer Phil Jenkins explains that what began as a biography eventually (d)evolved instead into what he also describes as Dawson’s ‘ghost-written’ autobiography. Jenkins means that, after encountering the truly massive collection of Dawson’s personal and family papers in the McGill University archives, he simply ‘laid out’ Dawson’s many letters ‘in a narrative line forty-five years long.’ ‘In creating a coherent narrative,’ however, ‘parts of some letters were moved to the times they described,’ with others rearranged ‘to ensure a narrative flow.’ ‘Every fact in this memoir is Dawson’s fact,’ Jenkins assures us, ‘as is every description of his travels.’ While Jenkins estimates that ‘close to ninety-five percent of the book is written in his [Dawson’s] own words,’ he [Jenkins] ‘tidied up’ the overall work ‘to best tell the story of a man who led a heroic life, and who deserves to have his story on as many bookshelves as possible.’ Jenkins is certainly right in his appraisal of Dawson’s importance in Canadian history as well as the spellbinding nature of his influential professional career. The son of the Nova Scotian geologist Sir John William Dawson (1820–99), principal of Montreal’s McGill College through most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, George was born into Canada’s scientific elite, educated at London’s prestigious Royal School of Mines, and then appointed to undertake the Geological Survey of Canada’s first forays after Confederation westward into British Columbia and northward into the Yukon during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. His accomplishments appear all the more remarkable in light of severe physical challenges that resulted from a childhood bout with tuberculosis of the spine. As a leader among the second generation of professional Canadian geologists, Dawson contributed not only to the geological and mineralogical mapping of enormous territories, but also to major theoretical issues confronting the science of the day, including the roles of both evolution and glaciation in shaping the country’s landforms and their denizens. His own interest in ethnology and anthropology also [End Page 322] helped to shape government policy toward British Columbia’s Native peoples, as well as initiating the museum collections of native artifacts that, for better or worse, sought to preserve these items for posterity. For all these reasons, Jenkins’s timely book makes fascinating reading, and it is no surprise that he found himself captivated by Dawson’s vivid scientific, literary, and artistic legacy. But there is no attempt in Jenkins’s approach to set any of Dawson’s many achievements into any kind of larger context. How, for example, are uninitiated readers to understand his unofficial observations about his Native guides? More poignantly, while we learn in an entire chapter about the devastating impact of the unrequited love of Dawson’s life, the lack of context does little to explicate what exactly happened, and what we might be able to learn about Victorian society from the ways in which both his family and others responded to his tragic disability. In the end, it is even unclear whether this animated reprinting of Dawson’s own letters is at all sufficient to convey the enormous significance of Dawson’s professional accomplishments. For historians, who ought long ago to have risen to the considerable challenge of providing a definitive biography of Dawson, this work raises still more fundamental questions. Without a single citation or even a single quotation mark throughout this book, how can we tell which 5% of the words do not belong to Dawson or, for that matter, when (and where, and for whom) he wrote the remaining 95%? In an irony that Jenkins himself recognizes, Dawson...

A Polluting Concept of Culture: Native Artefacts Contaminated with Toxic Preservatives

This research examines the practical and theoretical fallout of the toxic methods used by museum conservators to preserve native artefacts and regalia. These conservation practices, dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were undertaken before the age of museum professionalisation and within a larger context of cultural assimilation. Many of these chemical preservatives produce the same harmful effects in humans as they do in the organisms they were designed to eradicate. As these contaminated artefacts are repatriated, members of native communities who attempt to reintegrate them into ceremonial and daily practice are put at significant health risk. Not only do these pollutants undermine the stated goals of repatriation but they also stand as a literal instance of the way in which a hegemonic and interpreting culture has metaphorically contaminated the culture it has purported to preserve and display.

From the Colonial Exhibition to the Museum of Man. An alternative genealogy of French anthropology

The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, usually looked upon as an instance of colonial picturesque, may in fact be seen as a missing link in the history of French anthropology. Anthropology, both a symbol and an instrument of the new Native policy promoted by the organisers, played a key role in the project of displaying to the public the diversity of the peoples of the empires. The Exhibition provided a venue for anthropological conferences and opportunities for fieldwork, as it gave a prominent place to ethnographic documents, native artefacts and performers. In a sense, it appears as a rehearsal for the Museum of Man that was to be the heart of the discipline.

The Native Collector

Louis Situwuka Shotridge ( c1882-1937), a high-born Tlingit from Kluckwan, Alaska, collected Northwest Coast Native artifacts for the University of Pennsylvania Museum at Philadelphia for a period of 17 years. As proxy for both Nativeness and white cultural institutions, Shotridge enacted performances which were variously commensurable with, and `othered' from, each other. Compelled to mimic a subjectivity located within an imaginary semiotic of Ancient Tradition, Shotridge's performances of Nativeness benefited the Museum's epistemological authorities, at the same time as they facilitated their success in the anthropological trade. And yet Shotridge also succeeded in arrogating to himself - through the roles of collector, assistant curator and field ethnographer - cultural capital which approximated that of elite Anglo-Americans. Through an analysis of his letters, field notes, selected newspaper accounts and other biographical information, this paper explores the conflicting and collusive relations involved in Shotridge's role of `Native collector'.

Phantasmatic Indochina. French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature

This reflection on colonial culture argues for an examination of “Indochina” as a fictive and mythic construct, a phantasmatic legacy of French colonialism in Southeast Asia. Panivong Norindr uses postcolonial theory to demonstrate how French imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. In this careful reading of architecture, film, and literature, Norindr lays bare the processes of fantasy, desire, and nostalgia constituent of French territorial aggression against Indochina. Analyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, Norindr shows how the exhibition’s display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France’s cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism. He critiques the Surrealist counter-exposition mounted to oppose the imperialist aims of the Exposition Coloniale, and the Surrealist incorporation and appropriation of native artifacts in avant-garde works. According to Norindr, all serious attempts at interrogating French colonial involvement in Southeast Asia are threatened by discourse, images, representations, and myths that perpetuate the luminous aura of Indochina as a place of erotic fantasies and exotic adventures. Exploring the resilience of French nostalgia for Indochina in books and movies, the author examines work by Malraux, Duras, and Claudel, and the films Indochine , The Lover , and Dien Bien Phu . Certain to impact across a range of disciplines, Phantasmatic Indochina will be of interest to those engaged in the study of the culture and history of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, as well as specialists in the fields of French modernism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan (review)

84 China Review International: Vol. ?, No. ?, Spring 1994 John DeFrancis. In the Footsteps ofGenghis Khan Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. ix, 284 pp. $29.95. John DeFrancis' book is a delightful throwback to the 1920s and 1930s when the kind ofadventurous voyage he describes was not only in vogue but also possible. In 1935, DeFrancis and his fellow traveler (in the literal, not the metaphorical, sense of the phrase) H. Desmond Martin journeyed through treacherous terrain in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Gansu during a six-month, 4,000-mile excursion simultaneously fraught with danger and yet enlivened by observations of rapturously beautiful sites. DeFrancis relished the adventure, but he also intended to explore and learn about the lives ofordinary Mongols and Muslim Turks as well as their traditionally hostile Chinese neighbors. He fulfilled his desire for excitement as he rode unruly camels, almost drowned rafting down the western reaches of the Yellow River, and battled thirst, hunger, and other deprivations. His zest for learning led to a fine scholarly career in East Asian studies. DeFrancis followed in a line of distinguished, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryAmerican, not to mention European, Russian, and Japanese, travelers, adventurers, and explorers of Central Asia and Mongolia. The Englishman (though of Hungarian extraction) M. Aurei Stein, the Germans A. von LeCoq and A. Grünwedel, the Japanese Baron Otani, the Russian Kozlov, and the Frenchman Pelliot (whose exploits are colorfully described in Peter Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road [London, 1980] ) had already swept into Chinese Central Asia to excavate and export treasure troves of sculptures, paintings, textiles , and written texts which are now housed in the British Museum, the Hermitage , and the Musée Guimet. A decade or so before DeFrancis' journey, Roy Chapman Andrews, who could easilybe a prototype for the fictional Indiana Jones, had led an expedition to seemingly desolate stretches of the Gobi desert and had uncovered the remains of a Baluchitherium, the largest known land mammal, and the first dinosaur eggs ever found. Also, Owen Lattimore had begun his distinguished career by writing his Deserr Road to Turkestan, a highly popular account ofhis travels with a caravan along the old Silk Roads. Unlike some of these predecessors, DeFrancis did not intend to amass native artifacts copyright\994which might then be shipped to the U.S. Instead he yearned for adventure and by University ofsought an understanding of the peoples he encountered and the lands through Hawai'i Presswhich he traveled. Reviews 85 I must confess that, in addition to my own scholarly interest in the areas of DeFrancis'journey, I have a personal interest as well. The trip my father-in-law, John A. Herrmann, took in 1928 resembled DeFrancis' voyage. Like DeFrancis, he graduated from Yale with a wanderlust. Upon graduation, he and a close friend, Cecil Borg, agreed to meet in Delhi at a specific hotel on a specific day, with one traveling east from NewYork and the other west. Amazingly enough, they each arrived at the Delhi hotel on the appointed day at the appointed time. They then bought a car and were the first to travel through some ofthe most isolated regions ofAfghanistan in an automobile. The account of their journey, Rediscovering Genghis Khan (NewYork, 1937) is as charming as DeFrancis' work though not as well informed about the indigenous cultures and peoples. Sadly, Mr. Herrmann died in an airplane crash, and I, having written a biography of Khubilai Khan, never met a father-in-law who had "retraced" the steps of Genghis, Khubilai's grandfather. Unlike DeFrancis, Herrmann did not use his remarkable experience as a springboard for a career devoted to the study and understanding of the lands he visited as a young man. On the other hand, both DeFrancis and his traveling companion H. D. Martin have contributed to scholarship ,with DeFrancis focusing on the Chinese language and Martin writing The Rise ofChingis Khan and His ConquestofNorth China (Baltimore, 1950), a useful account ofearly Mongol militaryhistory and abook certainly enriched by the author's journey in 1935. Unlike his predecessors, DeFrancis reveals a social conscience and a concern for the people, not merely the objects,-of the region. He...